Farkhad Tursunov

Farkhad Yusupbayevich Tursunov was born on 30 October 1931 in Chimkent (now Shymkent) and has spent most of his life in Tashkent. From 1951 to 1957 he studied architecture at the Central Asian Polytechnic Institute in Tashkent and taught there until 1962.

In 1962 he worked as chief project engineer at Giproselstroy in Samarkand. From 1966 to 1969 he was deputy chief architect of Tashkent, at the time when the city centre was being rebuilt after the 1966 earthquake. In 1969 he joined the Tashkent Master Plan Research and Design Institute and directed it from 1976 to 1985.

He was active in professional bodies: a member of the Union of Architects of the USSR from 1965, deputy chairman of the Union of Architects of Uzbekistan in 1966 and 1968–1980, and a board member of the USSR union from 1988. According to the National Encyclopedia of Uzbekistan, in 1985–1988 he was first deputy chairman of the Uzbek society for the protection of historical and cultural monuments.

Tursunov took part in designing and building the centre of Tashkent (1969–1974), for which he shared the USSR State Prize of 1975 as part of a team. His other work includes the Pakhtakor metro station (1977), the Friendship of Peoples square complex (1974–1980, with Yevgeny Rozanov and Sadyk Adylov) and the Museum of the Friendship of Peoples (1976), the reconstruction of Lenin Square and the Tashkent master plan (1977, 1980), the Almazar housing district (1978–1980, as head of the design team), the Palace of Pioneers (1978) and a winter-sports centre in Zaamin (1981). According to Wikipedia, he was co-author, with Rafael Khayrutdinov, of the exhibition hall now known as the Central Exhibition Hall of the Academy of Arts of Uzbekistan.

After independence he kept taking part in major projects: the Turkiston Palace (1992), the Republican exchange centre (1996) and the Tashkent city administration building (1998). In 1994 he received the Alisher Navoi State Prize of Uzbekistan for the architectural ensemble of the Tashkent Palace of Friendship of Peoples; in 1972 and 1974 he had been awarded the USSR Council of Ministers Prize.

He is an Honoured Architect of the Uzbek SSR (1981), a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Arts (1979), an honorary foreign member of the Russian Academy of Arts (1991) and a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences. In the late 1980s he taught at the Tashkent Polytechnic Institute and later at the institute of architecture and construction, and holds the rank of professor. He co-wrote the books “The City Born Twice” (1970, with S. Adylov and P. Maksumov) and “Architecture of Soviet Uzbekistan” (1972, with K. Babaevsky and T. Kadyrova).